The Anti-Discipline: On Sarah Chinskiʼs Articles in Theory and Criticism

This essay goes back to the three articles Sarah Chinski published in Theory and Criticism between 1993 and 2002, in which she offered a sharply critical analysis of the Israeli art discourse. These articles were part of the journal’s general agenda in its formative years: to challenge the ideological biases at the heart of the research in the humanities and social sciences in Israel. But her articles went beyond that, questioning the critical stance itself – that of artists, curators, and academics – as yet another stage in the process of colonial Westernization aspired to by the Israeli subject. The essay thus demonstrates the anti-disciplinarian dimension of Chinski’s writings, which were forged before the fixation of critical concepts and moves. But what happens when criticism itself becomes a discipline and is incorporated into regular academic activity? When Chinski’s articles are taught in the institutions whose logic she questioned and within a disciplinary academic framework which she so vehemently resisted? Showing how the anti-disciplinarian dimension of Chinski’s project has faded away, this essay asks what changes in the political and artistic framework of analysis should be made in order to revive it.